Facebook Lays Out Blueprint For Connecting Hard-To-Reach Rural Areas (cnet.com) 37
Samantha Rhodes, writing for CNET: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took another step in his pet project to bring internet access to every corner of the planet. Facebook on Wednesday unveiled a platform that will give barebones connectivity to far-flung rural communities, called OpenCellular. The social-networking company will provide the skeleton for what you would need to bring cellular access, complete with open-source software that lets potential partners update and tweak the service to meet a community's needs. OpenCellular marks Facebook's latest attempt to push its goal of worldwide access, which aims to connect the last four billion people without internet access and the 10 percent of the population without cellular service. It's a priority for Facebook and Zuckerberg, even if not everyone agrees with their methods. Rather than go at it alone, this new program will rely on partners to run with the blueprints that it has drawn up.
Facebook will pay carriers (Score:2)
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LMFTFA: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took another step in his pet project to harvest and sell every bit of personal information about every product, er- person, living in every corner of the planet.
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I don't usually quote this source. But it seems particularly applicable: Revelation 13:15-17
Re:Facebook will pay carriers (Score:5, Interesting)
I *am* a rural Internet user. Yeah, it would be kind of nice to have a high-speed option that doesn't involve satellite lag and bandwidth caps, but damn... I'll make do with what I have if FB is the only other option. Most of us out here feel much the same: Fuck Facebook, and fuck their intrusive monetization plans. We'll do just fine without it, thanks.
Also, a thought for the city-dwellers: the lack of infrastructure such as broadband, non-well water systems, non-septic sewer, etc tends to keep people away from here. Heh - I barely get two bars of cell service on Verizon, none on any other carrier, and only get a signal on Verizon with a new (2015 or better) phone.
I kind of prefer it that way sometimes, since I moved out here to get the frig away from an increasingly overcrowded world of urban hipsters, wannabe gangsters, and McMansion-dwellers. If it means limited Internet, so be it - I'll make do, and I can do pretty well with what I do have. Netflix and Torrents are out of the question here (30 GB bandwidth cap), but that's okay with me.
If Google Fiber (or whatever) showed up tomorrow, I'd definitely look into it, but it's not really a must-have if having it means a loss of privacy.
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I see a few FB employees are on /. today with mod points... ;)
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Here in a metro area of 500,000+ people, the vast majority are on septic systems, and it's a huge ordeal with public outcry when some small areas are told they have to connect to the city sewer system. Same when water lines are extended and households are told they must stop using their wells and pay to connect to city water.
I can understand
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re: muni water/sewer... agree, totally. It is a trade-off between a higher power bill to run the pump/softener/etc, but then again, many small towns (in Oregon) have a 'base rate' of $60+/mo just to have that water meter piped to their homes, no matter the usage... larger towns are usually $30-$40/mo plus a base consumption level. I'll keep the well, in spite of the maintenance (filters, periodic shocking, etc) and the weird pre-filter smell (Iron sulfide - yay!).
Sewer is okay, as long as (as you've said) y
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In my area you have 90 days to connect to a new service sewer or water main in the area. If you do not connect in the first 90 then you are served official notice by the city marshal and given another 90 days. After 180 days the city will get your power meter removed and condemn the property until you connect to the sewer or water mains.
So. Everyone hooked up to sewer and everyone got a water meter. But a lot just put a single water faucet one foot from the new water meter and kept her house on well water.
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Fuck Facebook, and fuck their intrusive monetization plans. We'll do just fine without it, thanks.
Which article are you incensed about? Not TFA, it would seem.
Why remote? Why rural? (Score:2)
I would like to see an OpenCellular network spring up for those of us already connected, but connected through giant monopolistic profit centers.
Since these existing ISPs aren't really serving the needs of my community - shouldn't we have the ability to replace them?
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Out here in the Oregon Coastal Range, we actually do have something like that: http://www.coho.net/ [coho.net]
Pretty solid local ISP, radio-based (so line-of-sight is a must), and in spite of their no-torrent policy, pretty awesome people to work with. I'm not a customer (I live in a small valley w/ no tower in range or sight), but folks I know who are can't stop saying how good they are.
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I use Exede... pricey, but pretty good. Company VPN is rock-solid, webex and VoIP works well enough, and since I do *nix, ssh sessions are almost perfectly smooth.
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You DO have the ability to replace them. But it's expensive. So, got the money? Or when you said "replace them" did you mean "get someone else to replace them"?
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lets potential partners update and tweak the service to meet a community's needs.
Right, a $100K/yr sysadmin going to want to live at these places to help tweak network bandwidth? Cause with open source, you'll going to need one. Sure, there are smart kids in these rural areas, but you still need a higher education experience to work with open source.
I make well north of $100k (work-from-home), live 50 miles in the sticks outside of Portland, OR, know QoS well enough, and I wouldn't mind helping my neighbors out if it wasn't too much of a burden on time (pop. density in my 'neighborhood' is 14/mile, and I know 12 of them very well). OTOH, Facebook is a privacy-suck, so the answer would be 'no'.
Facebook is the new AOL (Score:4, Interesting)
Think about it. When AOL came out and got a lot of people online, most of them thought of "the internet" as whatever AOL presented to them. How many people do YOU know that think of "the internet" as whatever is on FB?
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Think about it. When AOL came out and got a lot of people online, most of them thought of "the internet" as whatever AOL presented to them. How many people do YOU know that think of "the internet" as whatever is on FB?
I'm ok with this if it means Eternal September moves to Facebook.
OpenBTS or WiFi? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's OpenBTS [wikipedia.org], not Facebook's new project, that developed incredibly cheap 2.5G GSM service on cheap, software defined radio hardware. That made some sense at the time, but today, why wouldn't you build your wireless network on WiFi instead?
A WiFi AP costs less than $20, and is very powerful if upgraded to OpenWRT, enabling wireless repeaters, QoS, local services, billing, and whatnot. GSM hardware (even with OpenBTS replacing most of it) is still much more expensive, is crufty and old, with security issues and overhead from a different telcom era that doesn't make sense to copy, today.
People want data more than voice, and VoIP makes the later easy over WiFi, too, with open source apps like CSipSimple integrating well with the Android dialer, logs, and contacts. The only thing traditional cellular/GSM has going for it is smooth hand-off, and circa 2008 the 802.11r (fast BSS) addresses that issue nicely.
Don't bother mentioning LTE... It's more efficient, but hardware is astronomically expensive compared to WiFi or OpenBTS, and incredibly power-hungry, too.
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It's OpenBTS [wikipedia.org], not Facebook's new project, that developed incredibly cheap 2.5G GSM service on cheap, software defined radio hardware.
Exactly. This idea has been around for yonks. Probably the most visible in international development circles was the Grameen Foundation's Village Phone [grameenphone.com] project. This included small-scale GSM transmitter/receivers along with phones that would be shared on a commercial pay-as-you-go basis.
I met a few people working on a variation of this in Timor Leste, and tried to get some formal backing and traction for this in some Pacific island countries. The bottom line is that it's a no-go scenario, because you have i